How Rolled Oats Helped Me Overcome Resistance

I once bought a bag of rolled oats.

Not a regular sized bag, a giant bag from Costco that weighs like 20 lbs

I hate oatmeal. 

But I liked the idea of making my own granola and cereal.

Healthier, cleaner, cheaper.

The bag ended up sitting in my pantry for 2 years.

What’s more ridiculous, I’ve carried that bag to 3 different apartments.

Still unopened. Still 20 lbs.

Until one day, I decided enough is enough.

I have to use these damn oats, they’re taking up half the space in my kitchen.

So I looked up a tutorial and gave it a try.

I couldn’t believe how easy it was.

Since then, I haven’t bought granola or cereal again.

I overcame my resistance to doing something new; the granola and I lived happily ever after.

just kidding

Overcoming one resistance doesn’t flip on the switch that propels you into a resistance-free life. 

Carajo, I wish it works that way. 

In the last 2 years I’ve tried a lot of new things:

• writing on X

• this newsletter

• growing my own food

And my life is still full of resistance.

My latest and strongest resistance is to making a new type of content — food.

I love eating. I am that person who sits at a dinner party and eats 2 hours after everyone finishes and moves on to heated debates about politics.

And Vietnamese cuisine truly puts every other country to shame.

It’s not just taste. It’s variety. Creativity.

They can turn almost every part of every plant and animal on earth into an exquisite meal.

I can live in Vietnam for 6 months and never repeat a single meal.

But there’s more…

Since last year, I have gotten really interested in making my own food. I like knowing where my food comes from, and what I am putting in my body.

It’s quite an addiction.

Combining the creativity of Vietnamese cuisine, plus the simplicity of American food and a touch of Puerto Rican…

And how lazy I am…

I have been making thousands of healthy, cheap, easy and downright delicious recipes.

And I’m not sharing them for many reasons….

• my kitchen is old, tiny and ugly; the content doesn’t look ‘good’

• my kitchen stuff are things left by previous tenants or whatever I stole from mine and Ray’s mom. Random and unaesthetic.

• I have way too many elaborated ideas for this type of content; they end up costing me HOURS of cooking and recording.

So really, it all comes down to one thing:

perfectionism.

As I scroll through my phone and see the hundred thousands of food pictures I’ve taken over the last year, I realized…

I’ve been waiting for the perfect idea to hit me — the perfect plan, the perfect template, the perfect content.

But that makes no sense.

How am I supposed to find the perfect idea before I even start?

I have this tendency to expect the first effort I make to be the only one.

Even though I know I shouldn’t ‘fear’ failure… I’m ‘supposed’ to fail… it’s all about trying again…

And yet…

I still want to do everything perfectly every time.

• I’ll make that granola when I have all the ingredients

• I’ll make that batch of yogurt when I have the right milk

• I’ll make food content when I figure out the best way to do it.

Not only that… I’m always waiting for the perfect time, or rather, more time.

Starting to think that day will never come…

Now, I could give you the top 3 ways to overcome resistance I found online and with gpt:

• break it down to smaller steps

• visualize the outcome

• find accountability

If these work for you, you can stop reading here and get on with it.

But they don’t work for me.

I’ve tried.

I mean, how do I find someone willing to hold me accountable for making my own granola? 

Am I supposed to think about nothing but granola until I get up and do it?

No thanks.

Instead, this is what I am going to try:

1. Call out my own bullshit

Having good reasons to not do something only means your brain is a clever sonofabitch, not because that reason is legit or even real.

Are you smarter than that or are you gonna let your brain play you?

2. Realize my desire 

While I was sitting on getting around to making my own yogurt and granola, I never let myself buy them at the store. Eventually, I crave it so much that I had to get off my ass and do it.

I notice the same thing is happening with this food content business. So many pictures are piling up in my phone I’m finally saying f*ck it, let’s do it.

So from now on, every time I have a desire to do something, I’m going to jog it down in my ‘desire journal’ — a place for my desire to grow.

I’ll write it over and over again every time it comes up. And I’ll pick the most repeated one and start there. 

3. Practice

Until you arrive at that perfect idea, everything is practice.

• cooking? practice

• running a business? practice

• finding purpose and redesigning you life? practice

You’ve really gotta drop the ego and think you can skip practice and head straight to results. 

Everything you do, until it clicks, is simply practice.

So rather than planning to make something happen, plan to practice. 

You take a lot of pressure off that way, and resistance becomes manageable. 

Starting anything new is overwhelming. You can’t downplay it.

However small the task, if you’ve never done it before, your brain is constantly buzzing behind the scenes with:

• What do I actually do?

• What does that look like?

• What if it doesn’t work?

• What if I hate it?

Better to stick with the familiar today and deal with it tomorrow.

But here’s the deal:

Tomorrow is just another day. It will feel just like today.

Except it isn’t real. Today is real.

At some point, you will have to take that first step, uncertainty and all.

So the sooner we get it out the way, the sooner we reap the rewards, no?

Sweet, sweet rewards.

And the longer we wait, the stronger resistance gets.

Idle time is the fuel that powers resistance and turns it into a self-serving maniac.

• Doubt turns into logic.

• Fear solidifies.

• Capability crumbles.

And we risk living with regret — a bitterness of knowing we didn’t give ourselves the chance to experience life to the fullest.

Do not let that happen.

You can’t end up carrying a 20-lb bag of oats with you everywhere you go for the rest of your lives.

That’s just silly.

What’s something you’ve been wanting to do?

Write it down. Realize every reason is just resistance. Practice doing it.

Sí se puede 

-A